Immediately after the publication of the _Lyrical Ballads_, the
two Wordsworths and Coleridge started from Yarmouth for Hamburg.
Coleridge's account in Satyrane's Letters, published In the
_Biographia Literaria_, of the voyage and of the conversation between
the two English poets and Klopstock, is worth turning to. The pastor
told them that Klopstock was the German Milton. "A very German Milton
indeed," they thought. The Wordsworths remained for four wintry months
at Goslar, in Saxony, while Coleridge went on to Ratzeburg, Göttingen,
and other places, mastering German, and "delving in the unwholesome
quicksilver mines of metaphysic depths." Wordsworth made little way
with the language, but worked diligently at his own verse.

When they came back to England, Wordsworth and his sister found their
hearts turning with irresistible attraction to their own familiar
countryside. They at last made their way to Grasmere. The opening book
of the _Recluse_, which is published for the first time in the present
volume, describes in fine verse the emotions and the scene. The face
of this delicious vale is not quite what it was when

"Cottages of mountain stone
Clustered like stars some few, but single most,
And lurking dimly in their shy retreats,
Or glancing at each other cheerful looks
Like separated stars with clouds between."

But it is foolish to let ourselves be fretted by the villa, the hotel,
and the tourist. We may well be above all this in a scene that is
haunted by a great poetic shade. The substantial features and elements
of beauty still remain, the crags and woody steeps, the lake, "its one